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<title>All You Can Do Is Trace The Stars by Westgate (Harkpad)</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26905927">All You Can Do Is Trace The Stars</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Harkpad/pseuds/Westgate'>Westgate (Harkpad)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Batman and Robin (Comics), DCU, DCU (Comics)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Abandonment, Child Abandonment, Coping Mechanisms, Isolation, Pre-Robin Tim Drake, Tim Drake Needs a Hug, Tim's a lonely kid, Whumptober 2020</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 23:40:15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>680</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26905927</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Harkpad/pseuds/Westgate</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Tim spends so much time alone in Drake Manor that he has a few quirky coping mechanisms. One of them is sleeping in different rooms sometimes. He loves his own room, but sometimes he just needs to be somewhere else.</p>
<p>Whumptober 2020: Abandonment/Isolation</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>123</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>All You Can Do Is Trace The Stars</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Tim spends most of his time in his bedroom, and his bedroom is definitely the best place in the Drake house. It’s cavernous, with a fifteen-foot ceiling and pale green walls. He has light beige carpeting and enough room for a four-poster queen bed. His bedspread is one of his favorite things. It’s a perfectly scaled star map of the night sky, and sometimes he sits on the bed and runs his index finger over his favorite constellations (Libra and Carina) before he crawls under the covers to sleep. He has a walk-in closet full of suits, school uniforms, polos, khakis, and button downs, and a dresser full of t-shirts, jeans, and sweatshirts. In the very back of his closet he has a box where he keeps clothes he’s bought himself – mostly skater-punk style – that he wears into the city when he sneaks out by himself, which is almost every weekend now that his parents really only come home every few months. There’s a gaming area near the closet with a navy-blue beanbag and a gaming console for a small, black flat-screen television mounted on his wall. He has an oak roll-top desk in one corner, but he only uses it when he wants to draw or do homework with pen and paper, or when he wants to pretend to be a detective working on a case. He leans back in his chair and says, “No, Mr. Batman, I don’t think that’s what the evidence suggests,” and then goes on to solve the case.</p>
<p>He also has a regular desk, a blocky, modern one with a desktop computer sitting on it, and a small stack of computer programming and hardware-building how-to books next to the monitor. He pretends to be a detective sometimes, but he is, in reality, a computer nerd who’s getting better and savvier about it every day. He spends most of his afternoons at that desk after breezing through his fifth-grade homework and the extra ‘enhancement work’ his mother assigns him every so often. He works at the desk until the window grows dark and his stomach growls. He traipses down to the kitchen to fix a quick sandwich or some pasta, and then he heads back to his room to work on his programming some more or to play video games.</p>
<p>Tim loves his room. He can easily forget about the empty, echoing house around him in his room.</p>
<p>But sometimes, especially the first few days after his parents leave for another trip, he slips out of his room when he finally gets tired enough to sleep and chooses one of the guest bedroom doors, opens it, and goes in. He pretends he hasn’t ever been in the room before (and they have enough guest rooms that he can avoid the same one for months) and he pokes around the room, muttering, ‘oh, this is nice!’ or ‘hmmm, why would they decorate like this?’. He stretches his arms and goes to the vanity mirror and talks to himself for a moment, “That was a very long day, wasn’t it? Yes. I think I’ll just turn in tonight. Maybe go sightseeing tomorrow. The trip has absolutely wiped me out.” He goes to the bed with the plain colored bedspread and climbs under the covers. When he wakes in the morning, he leaves the bed unmade and says to the mirror, “I’m going to go see what they’re offering for breakfast,” before heading down to the kitchen to go about his actual day. He returns to that room each night for a few nights, before he makes the bed carefully one morning and closes the door with a quiet, “Well, wasn’t that a nice few nights away,” and heads back to his own bedroom.</p>
<p>When he climbs in his bed again and runs his finger over the constellation on the bedspread, he says, “It’s good to be home again,” and he’ll last a month or two before getting the urge to go visit a different guest room for a night or two. . . just for a change of pace.</p>
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